Saturday, September 8, 2012

Last month I presented a card to both my parents from all their five children. Since their birthdays are about a month apart, we decided to celebrate it together as this year our dad turns 70!

The card was presented at The Macopolo, V.I. during a family luncheon.

I had just three days to create the card including rummaging through piles of family albums. I wanted to use both current and dated pictures to capture their growth over the years in a marriage that has spanned 44 years. It has been a long time, almost two decades I think, that I had worked with card boards to make custom cards. Anyway, I managed to pull it off.

The inner designs were made in both Corel DRAW and Photoshop and printed using the Epson large format printer. The cover is made of embossed cardboards all mounted on hardboard to provide support.

I made it a 6 page design. The first inner two pages contained general appreciation and benediction while the next two featured personal messages from both their children and grand children.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Some minutes past 4AM yesterday morning, I received a call informing me that armed robbers raided several houses along the street including my apartment. I did not spend the night at home, so, fortunately, the robbers met my absence. At crack of daylight I went home knowing fully well what I would not find there.

The assailants easily broke through my mosquito netting but could go no further on account of the burglary proofing at the front entrance. Undeterred, they make their way to the rear door. Sadly, the burglary proofing was not up to the task and they gained entrance into my sanctum sanctum.

The out-of-focus pix above is the kitchen floor littered with debris from the smash-in. One of my neighbours testifies it took only two kicks to break through!

Blood spatter on the door must belong to the guy that broke through the door. If this happened in one of the CSI programs, the blood sample will be cross matched with the criminal data base to reveal the culprit. But alas this is real life, in Nigeria!

The gun men obviously looked for the occupants of the apartment searching even the guest toilet.

They were in a hurry as evidenced by the confusion they left in their wake.

The shifted positions of my scanner and yet-to-be-installed prepaid meter showed they had a hard time making up their minds on what to take.

I am first of all grateful to God they did not meet me at home. I heard stories of how my neighbours and their children were heartlessly threatened at gun point. I am also grateful to God that the robbers were ignorant log-heads. As such, I was spared the otherwise painful loss of my Wacom Cintiq and external hard disks with all the irreplaceable data stored therein.

The gun totting thieves made away with stuff worth over N200,000. The most painful being my 17 inches HP Pavilion laptop. I am however encouraged with the fact that money can be earned, laptops can be bought, but life is irreplaceable.

I asked a co-tenant why the police were not called since the robbery operation lasted quite some time. She replied that the police were in fact called and responded they could not come over due to the lack of a squad car. Another woman described their guns as having big round barrels.

My appreciation goes to all my friends and well-wishers who have called in to sympathise. May you never have course to look down the business end of a loaded rifle.